The Towers and Temples of Ancient Ireland: their Origin and
History discussed from a New Point of View. By Marcus Keene, M.R.I.A. (Hodges, Smith, and Co.)—To do justice to this elaborate work, the reviewer ought to be an Irishman, an architect, and an antiquarian. We cannot pretend to any of those gifts, and therefore we are sorry to say that the book is thrown away upon us. All we can do is to admire its vast research, to point out certain engravings which seem to us full of artistic beauty, and to remark on some of the curious facts collected by Mr. Keene. One of the most notable of these is the statement that the early ecclesi- astics, when they were engaged in Christianizing the legends of the Irish, canonized the Devil. They found his name associated with many stone- roofed temples, which they supposed to have been ancient Christian churches, and accordingly they preserved his name with the prefix of "saint." Mr. Keene will see that we must have turned over some of his pages to discover this fact, and we are ready to admit that we looked far,, enough into his book to see that there was a great deal in it to which we could not pretend to do justice.
Previous page
